Data loss is a serious threat to companies of all sizes, and catastrophic data loss can destroy a business, however, most data loss is not the result of a big disaster, it is caused by human error, viruses, and disk malfunctions. A suitable backup routine provides the best protection against data loss of all kinds, and tape technology remains the most efficient and cost-effective means to perform system backup, whether for a small business or global operations.
The tape/tape drive industry has become fragmented with the proliferation of formats and technologies that have overly complicated customer buying decisions. The Liner Tape-Open (LTO) technology has been developed to combine the advantages of liner multi-channel bi-directional tape formats in common usage today with enhancements in the areas of timing-based servo, hardware data compression, optimized track layouts and high efficiency error correction code to maximize capacity and performance.
In the LTO technology, the read/write head includes servo reading elements, data reading elements, and data writing elements. The servo reading elements are used to read position error signal (PES), which is the mis-registration of the elements relative to the target location. In a typical operation, the servo reading element will read the pre-written PES format from the tape, and the LTO drives can use the detected PES as feedback to hold the read/write head at the target position. With the current LTO technology, the allowed PES error is close to 2 μm and is supposed to be close to 0.2 μm in the next 10 years.
The current read/write head manufacturing technology has a standard deviation of about 0.25 μm for the dimension between the servo reading elements and the data writing elements. In other words, even with perfect servo following with PES=0, data track targets have been written off +/−0.75 μm. This large variation can contribute to data loss and will be undesirable in future generation LTO formats.
The drawings referred to in this brief description should be understood as not being drawn to scale unless specifically noted.